Ecommerce Comparison

Check our comparison of 5 best eCommerce platforms

Magento

DemandWare

Ottemo

osCommerce

Shopify

Magento offers flexible, scalable eCommerce solutions designed to help you grow and succeed online. Cost-effective technology platform makes it possible for you to control the content, functionality, look and feel of your online store.

Pros

Feature-rich – the Community (free) version boasts features not commonly available in other solutions such as ability to manage multiple store fronts, multi-language and multi-currency support and is mobile and search engine friendly.

User-friendly – the administration area is one of the more user-friendly ones we’ve come across. A simple back-end with intuitive navigation and well organized store management features.

Cost - community version is free.

Community - wide community of users who have developed many extensions and plugins and can help with support.

Flexibility - Magento’s templating architecture allows you to pretty customize everything so you can create your site exactly how you want The software is open source so you have full control over the code so you can develop the functionality you need.

Scalable - as previously mentioned, Magento is built to scale so whether you’re selling 10 products or 10,000, Magento can handle it.

Cons

Developers – good Magento developers are hard to find. Magento is an extremely large system (over 20,000 files and 200 database tables) so it takes a fairly clever developer with good understanding of object oriented development and experience with the core software to really know what they’re doing.

Hosting - due to its largesse, Magento should only be hosted on dedicated servers that you can configure or providers who specialize in Magento hosting. Running Magento on normal shared hosting will create a slow and frustrating user experience for visitors.

Time - Magento’s flexible architecture also makes it complex. It usually requires more time to make the same customizations as in other solutions. It usually takes developers more time to get up the learning curve than other solutions.

Demandware is enterprise-class cloud commerce platform which set the standard for omni-channel commerce solutions. The core of the solution is a flexible digital commerce platform that minimizes the complexities and costs of running extensive global commerce operations and enables retailers to respond with speed and agility to new market opportunities and unforeseen consumer expectations.

Pros

Time - developing of the extensions for Demandware requires much less time than for another platforms.

High customers value support - Demandware hosted on closed, well configured, high-end servers with amazing performance, which allows to handle huge amount of customers at the same time.

Cons

Totally closed - you can't look inside Demandware and see how it works.

Cost - there is no free or trial version, you have to pay for it. Its only Enterprise level platform.

Ottemo is changing the eCommerce game by bringing Fortune 100 features to the Small and Medium Enterprise in a quick-and-easy downloadable solution. Mobile-first platform allows you to access all the eCommerce tools you need for your business from anywhere. Ottemo also provide a versatile API and sample configurations so you can kickstart your online store!

Pros

Unified Channel Engagement - Providing a seamless shopping experience across channels on desktop, mobile and social

Enterprise Support - Passionate Technical Account Management and Customer Support

Comprehensive Customer View - Merge customer data from all channels to build a comprehensive view of every customer

Cons

It’s a SaaS platform, not great for companies that like self­hosted platforms

While Ottemo is easy to theme, the theme selection is limited as the platform is still new to market

osCommerce provide you the tools to create your very own online store to start selling products and services to customers worldwide.

Pros

Open source - It is totally free and open source system. An open source license, meaning you can view and even change the code to suit your purposes.

Large community - It is supported by a large community of developers and has an extensive library of plugins available.

Automatic browser based installation - Version 2.2 is widely available from Web hosts on the popular cPanel domain management console, and has an automatic browser based installation and upgrade procedure, meaning it’s easy to implement and keep up to date.

Cons

Upgrade problems - When you upgrade, your plugins might stop working due to changes in the base code.

Susceptible to attacks - Free to you also means free to hackers, who can and do search the Web for standard installations to target.

Shopify help emerging small businesses get off the ground and grow into successful companies Shopify platform lets users easily and quickly create their own online store, without all the technical work involved in developing their own website, or the huge expense of having someone else build it.

Pros

Built-in Speed & Security for Hosting - An all-in-one solution like Shopify allows you to turn that side of the business over to the pros and just let them worry about hackers, caching, compliance, and a whole range of issues that come with hosting an online store.

Great Customer Support - Shopify has really fast, correct, and helpful support – from both a developer and store owner perspective.

Shopify App Store - Shopify provides the platform and all the core features, and allows developers to offer hyper-specialized products that plugin seamlessly to Shopify’s platform.

Cons

Pricing - client has 14 days trial period, after that he has to pay monthly fee.

Initial setup - with the release of Shopify 2 – Shopify has definitely made initial setup of your online store much easier – but it still isn’t a “just add water” step by step. For anyone who buys into Shopify expecting to be making money in 15 minutes is going to be disappointed.